Letters to the Editor: The food pyramid isn’t the issue. It’s how we process our food
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- Processing food, not the food pyramid, is the main culprit behind America’s chronic health epidemic.
- Research by nutritionist Weston A. Price found Indigenous cultures eating unprocessed diets suited to their environments stayed healthier than modern populations.
- Giving people access to real, unprocessed food could significantly reduce chronic health problems plaguing modern society.
To the editor: Guest contributor Gene Baur’s op-ed misses the point entirely (“New food pyramid is a recipe for health disasters,” Jan. 21). The problem isn’t the food pyramid; it’s what we do to the food.
Travel the globe and you’ll find people eating a variety of foods that, if placed into a pyramid, would look very different from our food pyramids.
Nutrition researcher Weston A. Price did just that about a century ago. He found Indigenous cultures that ate foods that were found in their native environment — and in many cases, their diet was vastly different than ours. And they didn’t suffer the same health problems that we suffer from. Often, the difference was that their food wasn’t heavily processed.
The processing of the food is a big issue in our burgeoning health crisis. Whether we eat more meat, less meat, more fats, less fats, vegan or vegetarian is secondary. Robert Lustig makes a very compelling case in his book “Metabolical” that our health began to decline at about the same time as food started being heavily processed.
Forget the food pyramid. Give people access to real food — food that hasn’t been heavily processed — and you would see many of our chronic health problems begin to decline.
David Tempest, Mar Vista
